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Kicking a Man When He's Gone

By

Terry Teachout

Updated April 10, 2009 12:01 a.m. ET

New York

What will American playwrights do without George W. Bush to kick around? Judging by Christopher Durang's "Why Torture Is Wrong, and the People Who Love Them," it would appear -- at least for the moment -- that they'll simply have to keep on kicking. Mr. Bush, it seems, is the indispensable man of political theater, the all-purpose target without whom no self-respecting progressive, Mr. Durang included, can hope to get through the working day.

To be sure, Mr. Bush is never mentioned by name in "Why Torture Is Wrong," but he is omnipresent all the same, for it is his war on terror that is the highly specific subject of Mr. Durang's scattershot satire. How specific? This specific: "John Yoo from the Justice Department wrote a torture memo that says it isn't torture unless it causes organ failure. And even if it does that, as long as the President says the words 'war on terror,' it's A-okay." In case you didn't notice, that's a joke. "Why Torture Is Wrong" is full of such "jokes," which is one of the reasons why it soon outstays its welcome: Mr. Durang, who is under normal circumstances a very witty man, has made the mistake of letting his anger get the best of him.

The first act, in which Mr. Durang portrays the foibles of a nuclear family with his usual zany detachment, starts off predictably but promisingly. In the opening scene we meet Felicity (Laura Benanti), a nice girl who inadvertently gets married to Zamir (Amir Arison), a not-so-nice guy who might or might not be a terrorist. She brings him home to New Jersey to meet her parents, both of whom are cracked down the middle and up the sides. Luella (Kristine Nielsen) is a dizzy, theater-obsessed suburban matron, while Leonard (Richard Poe) is a right-wing stick figure who won't eat his wife's French toast unless she calls it "freedom toast." Yes, it's a stock situation, but Mr. Durang gets a fair amount of comic mileage out of it -- up to the point when we discover that Leonard is not merely a grumpy conservative but a full-fledged fascist who hauls the hapless Zamir upstairs and subjects him to "enhanced interrogation methods."

Details

"Why Torture Is Wrong, and the People Who Love Them" Public Theater 425 Lafayette St. ($60-$70), 212-967-7555, closes Apr. 26

From there Mr. Durang is reduced to ranting, giving Luella a long list of social-issue hot buttons to punch reflexively: "I said to your father, why do you want to give stem cells the vote, that's complicated, why don't you just steal the election like you did in Ohio in 2004?" That so talented a playwright should be reduced to such banal flash-the-applause-sign tactics is downright embarrassing. He might as well have had Luella hold up a picture of Dick Cheney in prison stripes. Then he pulls the postmodern lever, starts the play over again, and gives us a "happy" ending. Don't ask why -- I never did manage to figure it out.

Vast amounts of ingenuity have been lavished on "Why Torture Is Wrong" by Nicholas Martin, the director, who does his best to create the illusion that Mr. Durang's script is funnier and more focused than it really is. I was going to single out Ms. Nielsen for special praise, but the fact is that everyone in the cast deserves it, and Mr. Martin's zippy staging maximizes the comic possibilities afforded by David Korin's turntable set, which keeps the show in near-constant motion.

Would that this collective cleverness had been put to more timely use! Aside from being overlong and insufficiently amusing, "Why Torture Is Wrong" has missed its moment: The Bush administration is now history, and henceforth all will be changed, changed utterly by a president of whom Mr. Durang is an avowed admirer. (Maybe that's the point of the happy ending.) War on terror? What war on terror? "The administration has stopped using the phrase," Secretary of State Clinton announced the other day. Perhaps a time will come, though, when Christopher Durang finds it possible to chortle no less sardonically at such starry-eyed proclamations. The sword of a true satirist, after all, is double-edged.

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"Rock of Ages" is a moderately amusing jukebox musical whose ear-shredding score consists of a compilation of the greater and lesser hits of such noted arena rockers of the '80s as Pat Benatar, Bon Jovi, Foreigner, Journey, Styx and Twisted Sister, all of which I loathed when I first heard them on the radio a quarter-century ago. It would be the grossest of understatements to say that I expected nothing out of "Rock of Ages," so I'm pleased -- sort of -- to report that it could have been a whole lot worse.

Constantine Maroulis in "Rock of Ages."
Joan Marcus

The premise of this unpretentious show appears to be that hair metal and power ballads are guilty pleasures, meaning that it's all right to enjoy them so long as you make fun of yourself for doing so. Chris D'Arienzo's book, whose girl-meets-guitarist plot is several notches sillier than a Mike Myers movie, is peopled with characters named Wolfgang von Colt and Stacee Jaxx and lines like "Stacee still owes me from that hotel incident with the Cool Whip and the baby llama." If you grew up listening to songs like "Hit Me With Your Best Shot" and "Waiting for a Girl Like You," "Rock of Ages" will fill you with nostalgia for the days when you were young and foolish. If not, you'll find it to be an hour too long.